Sister Praeministramme Edhilda Haggebone – The Imettäjä

Here’s the finished concept of my first character for The Pilgrym project – Edhilda Haggebone, Sister Praeministramme of Adeptus Sororitas Orders Hospitaller.

So what’s next? I think I’ll start to gather bits together and begin adapting her in to a miniature form. That should be fun. I’ve also started forming the next character in my head, even done some small doodling, though nothing showable yet.

Kari

Related

Pureness!!! It’s like you’ve distilled 40k and Terra’s dystopian heart in to a delicious vision that will hang in the air until we see the finished model. Kari this is absolutely a start of a legendary body of work.

Cheers Odie! Designing this sort of stuff for GW would be an interesting adventure, but I would guess their new course in AD and published material is more CGI oriented nowadays. It would be cool to design this sort of stuff “behind the scene” though, giving new ideas and inspirations for those who do the actual published material, like JB did/does.

I guess that’s more of what I meant – more behind the scenes artwork-based inspiration and concept design, rather than actual mini design. It seems like the Inq community is such an incubator for ideas, it would be a shame for some of the talent found there to go to waste. Then again, I think we’re all pretty happy to just be doing our own things anyway.

Praeministramme comes from the Latin Praeministra, female attendant. Immetaja is Finnish for wet-nurse. I have had little luck with Edhilda as a name but it can be broken up into the ed- prefix, which has the force of repetition, renewal, ‘backwardness’ or ‘against’ the word to which it is prefixed and ‘hild’ which is war, so possibly Edhilda = against-war-one = peaceful one??? (that makes me think of the Eumenides, the Kindlie Ones, something I will come back to in a way). Very much a guess as I have no Old English.

The spyres of Holie Terra are excellent, Gothic detail on Gothic detail, great yet fine arches, the pillars sickeningly falling out of sight… pillared bridge-processionals so vast they could be thronged with millions of pilgrymmes (I imagine the detail along the longest bridge as a vast processione of pilgrymmes, those in front carrying banners whose poles we see as upright lines, then vast throngs behind until some great moving pulpit or tableau hauled by penitents beaten on (like the tableaux of holy weeke in seville), only viaible as a darke mass in the painting… vast statues, balconies and buttresses.

The sky is a pale sepia-brown of pollution, the sun white and sickly )… white and sickly like the God-Emperor in ten millennia of living sacrificial death, ”the Sunne so brighte shutte up hys lytte and all moste wane did turne, so Heaven and Earthe lamente his deathe and why should I not murn?”) (pathetic fallacy — or is it? I’ve brooked my private theory that Terra is moulded by the Emperor’s psychic presence before), the spyres are shrouded in a mist of incense, fumes and soot yet they gleam golden under the thick layer of dirt and glitter with lights– grandeur and decay, gold and smog and rot, all imitating the gilded, incensed, suffering living carcase of an incarnate God.

The platform on which the Sister stands is a good example of this — a foul belch of grey smoke rises beneath it, it is grimy or filthy yet it has the proud shape of a prowed ship and gleams golden in the pale light.

Now for the Sister herself.The habit seems to consist of a long dress up to the waist and a body-glove, open at the teat, above it… or else the metal spiked collar is fused with the flesh…. The head-dress reminds me very strongly of a doll I found a picture of wearing ‘finnish regional dress’ (http://cdn0.rubylane.com/shops/americana-and-whimsy/wth62009-2928.1L.jpg) crossed with a Bishop’s mitre.

We know that the Immetajatte (imetaja, imetajat is the correct plural, I think?) are as the name would suggest, the wet-nurses of the Imperial nobility, elderly sisters hospitaller who provide milk constantly, sometimes blood spurts from their teats and this mingled drink of blood and milk is seen as a great honour. The tube runs from the breast to a container that seems to be attached to the glove or her skin while another runs to a backpack which seems to contain syringes but has a rather technical look and I wondered if drugs of some sort can be added to the milk. I found myself wondering if only infants received their ministrations and have the idea of broken, ancient Inquisitors, Cardinals and Nobles receiving the modified milk of an Immetaja as the only thing their ancient bodies can stomach… The phials with the ”I” of the ministorum, the seals and the skulls suggest the milke is quasi-sacred.

The thin dagger held behind her back made me think that these nurses are also charged with carefully scrutinising and dispatching their infant or aged charges, perhaps with drugged milk, perhaps with a slit of the throat, should they prove mutated, idle, selfish or corrupt… so the Peaceful One (my own interpretation of Edhilda) has a similar meaning to the Greek Kindly Ones, goddesses of revenge… she administers the Emperor’s nourishment to his good servants but will cut them off at once to face his wrath should they err. The skulls and servo-skulls remind us of that part of her trade…

If you carefully study the crow you will notice the beak looks very like sister haggebone’s nose and the claw imitates her clawed hand clutching the phial — I wonder what the significance of the crow is.